Recent Stories with tag romy schneider

The weather is getting summery, but if you still want to spend some time indoors, there's plenty of movies for your rental pleasure.  Let's check out this week's new releases on DVD, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. 

If you can't wait till Wednesday for your Robert Pattinson fix, there's the romantic drama Remember Me, in which R-Patz falls for Lost's Emilie de Ravin before tragedy strikes in the form of a spoiler you can easily look up all over the internets. A slightly less realistic romance occurs in She's Out of My League, with dweeb of the moment Jay Baruchel. If you're looking for the inner workings of a real relationship, please see The Last Station starring Christopher Plummer and Dame Helen Mirren as Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sofya.

This week also brings Green Zone, in which Matt Damon is a soldier in Iraq. It's directed by Paul Greengrass, which means there's lots of handheld camerawork, translating into action sequences where you can't tell what's occurring or who is chasing whom. We get it already--war is confusing!  Too bad this film culminates in the shocking reveal two-thirds of the way through:  there are no WMD in Iraq.  Do yourself a favor and avoid this Snore Identity....

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Yep, another week of SIFF here and gone.  All of us at The SunBreak weigh in with our picks and pans of the films shown at the festival this week.

Tony saw Ahead of Time, a concise, solid doc on the achievements of Ruth Gruber--arctic explorer, World War II Correspondent, and chronicler of the 1947 Exodus. At age 94, Gruber's more articulate and sharp than 99.9 percent of people a third her age; her restless streak, eloquence, and charm made her an enchanting documentary subject.

Josh had a shortish SIFF week: Waste Land, a meandering but discussion-provoking documentary about Vik Muniz and the garbage-pickers who inspired his portrait series. At times I couldn't tell if this film wanted to be about the artist, the gleaners, or the way that large-scale portraits made from materials found at the world's largest landfill could transform lives. It succeeds a little bit on each of those fronts, but could have used a stronger narrative focus and a critical voice stronger than the artist's wife (who falls out of the picture midway, via an off-screen mid-project divorce). Quibbles aside, the artwork is astounding and Muniz found incredibly charismatic subjects. We left wondering not about how to "save" the pickers of Jardim Gramacho, but curious about whether similar poverty-driven recycling efforts happen here.

I really enjoyed I Killed My Mother, a très style-y collage chronicling the growing pains between a temperamental teen artiste and his single mother. The explosive tantrums and outlandish verbal spats felt true to the spirit of adolescent angst; the mix of hypersaturated fantasy sequences, off-center camera angles, quick cuts, and philosophical confessionals captured the spirit of a young auteur. Against likely temptation, Xavier Dolan doesn't let himself off the hook too easily, revealing an awareness of his own childish behavior and rendering a sympathetic portrait of his mother. (June 6, 2010 7:00 PM @ the Egyptian)

Audrey also had Quebecois fun at I Killed my Mother, but I wonder if writer-director-lead actor Dolan has another film in him; this one is so personal. Coincidentally, Bilal's Stand is another intimately personal film, in which writer-director Sultan Sharrief has made his first feature, based on the story of how he, as a black Muslim teen, made it from an inner city Detroit taxi-stand to the University of Michigan, via an ice-carving college scholarship. It's a solid first film (and the community involvement it took to make it is inspiring), though of course it's not as OMG as I Killed My Mother....

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